OART-UT 1058 — Abrupt Climate Change
Abrupt Climate Change is offered through the Open Arts Department at NYU Tisch
.
Statement of Purpose
On June 23, 1988, Dr. James Hansen, then Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the
United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that our planet was warming — and that the principal cause was the accumulation of anthropogenic (produced by humans) greenhouse gases.
In the decades since, multiple independent lines of evidence have established with high confidence that Earth’s climate is warming and that the dominant driver is the combustion of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
While the overall warming trend is unambiguous — global mean surface temperature has risen by approximately 1.1 °C since the late nineteenth century — the precise rate at which future warming will accelerate depends on both human emission pathways and the strength of climate-system feedbacks.
These feedbacks include, for example, the loss of reflective sea ice, the release of additional greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost, and changes in cloud cover. Although the magnitude and
timing of these feedbacks remain active areas of research, the scientific literature consistently indicates that they will, on balance, amplify the warming already under way.
Defining Abrupt Climate Change
In 2004 a U.S. Senate Committee defined abrupt climate change as
“a change in the climate that occurs so rapidly or unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty adapting to the climate as changed.”
Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica possess distinct layering where seasonal snowfalls compress to form ice with identifiable chemical and physical characteristics. Annual layers in ice cores
are distinguishable through visual stratigraphy, dust content, electrical conductivity, and stable-isotope ratios (δ18O and δD).
These layers permit year-by-year or, in some intervals, season-by-season chronologies extending back more than eight hundred thousand years.
Greenland ice cores — most notably GRIP, GISP2, NGRIP, and NEEM — record approximately twenty-five Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events between about 110,000 and 11,700 years before present. During each event, Greenland surface temperatures rose by roughly 8 °C–10 °C (≈ 14 °F–18 °F) within decades.
The Younger Dryas termination, circa 11,700 years ago, is a well-studied example, with Greenland warming estimated near
10 °C in one to two decades.
These temperature jumps reflect conditions over the North Atlantic region. Global mean temperatures rose much less because the abrupt changes involved climate-system reorganizations (ocean circulation, sea-ice extent) that strongly affected Greenland but were partially offset elsewhere. Antarctica exhibits corresponding events, called Antarctic Isotope Maxima, but the temperature swing there is smaller (typically 2 °C–4 °C) and occurs out of phase with Greenland, consistent with the bipolar-seesaw mechanism.
This data indicates that there have been at least twenty instances where Earth’s climate changed by roughly 15 °F (8 °C) within a ten-year period — long before recorded history.
The Present Context
As of October 9, 2020, atmospheric carbon dioxide measured 408.55 ppm (parts per million); by January 26 it reached 412.96 ppm — the highest concentration of this critical greenhouse gas
in three million years. At that time, our planet was nearly five degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and sea levels were thirty-two to sixty-five feet higher than today.
Governments and human beings possess neither the experience nor the technology to sustain life as we know it under conditions of rapid and unprecedented change.
The Role of Art
Scientists are not artists. The precise reporting of painstakingly gathered information is the realm of science. The artist, however, can bridge the divide between science and the public through
creative storytelling — transforming knowledge into empathy and action.
About the Course
Abrupt Climate Change (ACC) is offered to students who are interested in understanding the impact of a rapidly changing climate upon their lives and communicating this information to society
through artistic media of their choice. To prepare for an increasingly uncertain future, students hear from academic experts in business, law, and the mathematical, physical, and social sciences, and then
create artistic responses to humanity’s greatest existential threat.
If you are interested in learning how to think about — and prepare to thrive within — a changing climate, this class is for you.
This is the second in a series of related courses unique to Tisch and neither competes with nor replicates existing classes. Abrupt Climate Change is open to all NYU students.
Peter Terezakis
Associate Arts Professor, Tisch School of the Arts – NYU
“Failing to Prepare is Preparing to Fail.”
— Benjamin Franklin, 1706–1790
